With marijuana law reform sweeping the nation, will consumers be driven to drink more or less alcohol?

As the legalization of recreational marijuana gains momentum across the United States with public support at an all-time high,
many advocates eagerly await to see what effect legalization will have
on big alcohol. Will it be forced to fight for market share? Or is
alcohol so heavily ingrained in our society that pot legalization will
barely create a ripple with booze consumption remaining unaffected?

In
the cannabis reform movement, it is an article of faith that the more
pot is legally accessible, the less booze will be consumed, but is there
evidence to support that theory? The answer to the overall question
likely depends on how cannabis and alcohol interact in our culture,
that is, whether pot will complement booze and vice versa or whether
people will choose pot as an alternative to drinking.

As Forbes
explains, if the two substances are complements, then states legalizing
marijuana would expect to see more consumption on both sides, which may
increase competition and likely exacerbate pre-existing health concerns
about over-consumption of alcohol, particularly in this era of mixing
red bull and other highly caffeinated drinks with booze. However, if
pot truly becomes a substitute for alcohol, than legalizing marijuana
may reduce alcohol consumption.

According to economists, D. Mark Anderson and Daniel Rees, co-authors of the most recent research on this topic published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, marijuana and alcohol are substitutes rather than complementary substances.

The co-authors cite a number of prior studies ranging from 2001-2013, which illustrate that as marijuana becomes more readily available, adults respond by drinking less, not more,
with pot legalization associated with a reduction in heavy drinking
amongst 18 to 29-year-olds and a five percent decrease in beer sales.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

End Scrooge Employer's Theft of Worker's Holidays

At the very least require them to pay triple time.

As
hard as it may be for these fucking soulless Corporate Douches to
imagine, employees have real lives outside of work. As much as these
Libertarian assholes would like us to be slaves we too have families we
love, entertainments we enjoy far more than killing all the joy in our
lives so some fucking rich asshole can make a profit off of our lives
and labor.From The Guardian UK:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/28/walmart-black-friday-protests-thanksgiving

Record numbers of workers plan to protest major retailers, with Walmart at centre of row over holiday wages and hours

Retail workers and union activists are preparing for a record day of
action across the US on Friday, protesting wages and conditions on the
busiest shopping day of the year.

Retailers, including Macy's, are opening their doors on Thanksgiving for the first time this year, joining other store giants including Target, Sears and Kmart. But it is Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, which has attracted the focus of protests.

Protests
are planned at more than 1,500 of Walmart's 4,000 US stores on Black
Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday and traditionally the
start of the festive shopping season. Last year similar protests
attracted 30,000 workers and supporters. This year organisers said they
expect even larger protests with retail workers angered by the decision
of many more retailers to open on Thanksgiving, traditionally a national
holiday.

Workers lobby group Our Walmart plans to lead protests
by supporters and staff, many of whom will be working Thanksgiving for
the first time this year. Church groups and civil rights, consumer and
environmental organisations including the National Organization for
Women, The Sierra Club, Color of Change and the National Consumers
League have all pledged support.

Tiffany Beroid, who works at the
stores Laurel, Maryland store, said she would be joining this year's
protest. Beroid, 29, said she earned $12,000 last year working full time
as a customer service manager for the company but had to go part-time
this year because she could no longer afford her child care. "Even if I
worked 40 hours a week, I wouldn't be able to afford child care," she
said. "We need better wages and respect in the workplace. Walmart can
afford to treat us better."

The company has said associates – as
it calls its workers – who work over the holiday will receive an
additional day's pay, a 25% discount off a Walmart purchase and will be
served a Thanksgiving meal during the Black Friday shift. More than a
million associates are expected to staff Walmart stores during the
events.

A Walmart spokesman dismissed the protests as "a union
orchestrated PR event" and said that the National Labor Relations Board
had okayed unions to pay some protesters $50 to join the protests.

"Very
few of these people will be actual Walmart employees," she said. "We
are really focussed on sales and serving our customers. We don't believe
there will be any disruption at stores. It's business as usual at
Walmart."

Every year at this time politically correct people come out of the woodwork to debunk Thanksgiving.

Yes
I realize the European Colonialists killed off the Indigenous People.
Genocidal wars are as old as the ancestors of modern humanity and not
the invention of Europeans although they have waged more than their
share.

While American kids are taught that the First Thanksgiving
was to celebrate peace between the Pilgrims and the Indigenous Peoples
of Massachusetts its origins like most origins is much older and found
in harvest festivals around the world.

Harvest festivals as such
usher in the Winter and mark the beginnings of a season of holidays and
feasts that brighten what is the darkest part of the year in the
northern hemisphere.

Christianity laid claim to those holidays and assigned Christian significance to them.

Yet
with things like Christmas trees and yule logs it is hard to escape the
pre-Christian origins of many of these seasonal rituals.

Today Robert Jensen has a piece on Alternet titled: No Thanks to Thanksgiving. Seems he expects us to all atone for events over which we had no control.

I
will stipulate that colonialists did terrible things in the 1620s.
From the time the Spanish first came to the Americas they waged a
genocidal war against the Native Peoples.History
is filled with campaigns of genocide. No doubt there will be campaigns
of genocide in the future as we run out of resources for the ever
increasing billions of people.At times
like this I feel I have the right to invoke the Serenity Prayer.
Especially since in it one asks for the strength to change those things
one can change, the serenity to accept those things I'm powerless to
change and the wisdom to know the difference.As I have gotten older I have come to realize I am powerless to change the past.I
barely have control over the events that immediately shape my life
conditions and my ability to survive can be dependent upon the whims of a
fickle employer with a bad temper.The short version of the serenity prayer is this: Fuck it! I'm thankful I am nearly 13 years sober.I'm thankful for my relationship with Tina, we have been together longer than I've ever been together with another person.I'm thankful for the pittance I get from Social Security, for Medicare and for e-Bay and swap-meets. I'm thankful I currently don't have to kiss the ass of some fickle boss who has a mean streak.I'm
thankful that I am an American. I've had the opportunity to live in a
number of incredible places in this beautiful country and have enjoyed
the weirdness, craziness and beauty of all those places.As angry as I am with too many things I still have a glimmer of optimism.Thanksgiving
isn't about shopping. It isn't about wars or remembering veterans. It
isn't about the long dead Pilgrims and Native People.It's
a harvest festival, a time of giving thanks and feasting to celebrate
the past year. It is the first of a series of holidays that carry us
through to after the start of the New Year.

The new pope's economic justice platform will continue to fall short if it ignores women's and LGBTQ rights

Pope Francis issued a mission statement for his papacy on Tuesday that features an incredibly direct indictment of free market economics
and growing global inequality. Agnostic or religiously indeterminate
progressives of the Internet were suitably excited, as they have been before about the new pope.

Francis doesn’t pull any punches when laying into those who preach the gospel of trickle down, noting in the 84-page document
that, “This opinion [about trickle down theories], which has never been
confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the
goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings
of the prevailing economic system.”His critique grows more explicit in the next paragraph, continuing:

While
the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap
separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.
This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute
autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently,
they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common
good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born,
invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes
its own laws and rules.

Francis, to his great
credit, is taking his religiously-grounded critique of capitalism well
beyond the bland reassurances of his predecessors (and his many
contemporaries in church leadership) that “the poor will inherit the
earth,” and into a far more radical, policy-oriented place. He is using
the heft of his position to pressure leaders to reform a global system
that actively marginalizes billions of people across the globe.

Having
the leader of 1.2 billion global Catholics get explicit about holding
corporate heads and global leaders accountable for causing widespread
poverty and all of its resultant suffering is no small thing. And his
recent remarks have made all of the right people angry, which is also worth noting.

The 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, amounted to
an official platform for his papacy, building on views he has aired in
sermons and remarks since he became the first non-European pontiff in
1,300 years in March.

In it, Francis went further than previous comments criticizing the
global economic system, attacking the "idolatry of money" and beseeching
politicians to guarantee all citizens "dignified work, education and
healthcare".

He also called on rich people to share their wealth. "Just as the
commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to
safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt
not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,"
Francis wrote in the document issued on Tuesday.

"How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless
person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses 2
points?"

The pope said renewal of the Church could not be put off and said the
Vatican and its entrenched hierarchy "also need to hear the call to
pastoral conversion".

"I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has
been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from
being confined and from clinging to its own security," he wrote.

Struggling families all across America now have less food on their tables. Budget cuts that kicked into effect November 1 have lowered the nation’s average federal food stamp benefit to less than $1.40 per person per meal.

Austerity American-style is squeezing elsewhere as well. Seventy
percent of local agencies that service seniors have had to cut back on
Meals on Wheels deliveries. The “sequestration” federal budget cuts that
began this past March have also shut out 57,000 preschoolers from Head Start.

More cuts are looming, as lawmakers on Capitol Hill near still
another budget deliberation deadline, this one midway through December.
The next federal program in the cross-hairs? Maybe the biggest of them
all: Social Security.

Average Americans, of course, don’t want Social Security cut. Over three-quarters of Americans, polling shows, oppose any Social Security cutbacks.

If anything, average Americans have become even more committed to
keeping Social Security whole — and for good reason. Social Security
currently stands as America’s only retirement bedrock.Not too long ago, pensions also used to deliver real retirement security. But the nation’s biggest corporations have cut back
on traditional pensions. In 1980, 89 percent of Fortune 100 companies
guaranteed workers a “defined benefit” at retirement. By last year, only
12 percent offered that level of security.

Companies have replaced
traditional pensions with 401(k)s, and many giant firms — like Walmart —
don’t even offer a guaranteed match on employee 401(k) contributions.
The predictable result? Among Americans between 50 and 64, the bottom 75
percent by wealth average just $26,395 in retirement assets.

Earth
to climate change deniers: The vast majority of Americans are worried
enough about global warming to want our government to help stop this
scourge.

This good news for people who believe science should
drive our climate policy comes from a series of surveys conducted by
Stanford University. Even in so-called “red states,” a clear majority of
Americans said government action was needed to stop man-made climate change — regardless of what other countries might do about it.

Another
poll, which contrasted responses from Democrats, Republicans, and
Independents, found that two-thirds of Americans believe in climate
change. That includes half of Republicans, up from only one-third of
them in 2009.

In early October, India was forced to evacuate 900,000 for Cyclone Phailin,
which devastated that country’s whole east coast. A month later, the
worst tropical storm in recorded history struck the Philippines. Then,
200-mile-an-hour winds leveled Washington, Illinois as fierce tornadoes
killed eight people in the Midwest.

No single extreme weather
event can be tied to climate change, but unless we stop climate change,
it’s pretty clear that devastating storms and wildfires will become
increasingly common. Yet less than 5 percent of TV or newspaper coverage
in the six days following Super Typhoon Haiyan made a serious
connection between the Philippines’ true climate catastrophe and the
world’s belching power plants, swarming autos, leaking gas wells, or
clear-cut forests.

Many politicians are trying hard not to connect
the dots either. Lawmakers representing fossil fuel states seem to
think that they risk all if they call for the kinds of changes that
would shrink our carbon footprint.

If
the latest polls aren’t evidence enough that voters may actually reward
action to avert a climate crisis, maybe it’s time they got organized.You
know, the West Virginians would seek to limit natural gas, the
Pennsylvanians would demean oil, and the Texans would clobber coal. But
that’s not how it works.So now President Barack Obama and the EPA
are stuck trying to reduce emissions without any help from Congress.
But they’ll need a hand from the courts too. Tons of lawsuits have been
ambling through the system to the Supreme Court, which in October issues a mixed ruling that gave the fossil fuel boosters another shot.What
can you do? Some options are obvious: Use less energy. Walk more. Start
a carpool if you can. Recycle. Compost. Choose more energy-efficient
light bulbs, refrigerators, and vehicles.You can take action that
goes deeper, too. Do you have any savings invested in stocks and bonds?
Clean up your portfolio by divesting any oil, gas, and coal assets you
might own. Even if you aren’t an investor, you can join the fossil fuel
divestment movement and encourage your university or town to get out of
that dirty business and invest in renewable alternatives instead.So far, Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and at least 18 other cities have announced that they’re going this route. Student campaigns at hundreds of colleges and universities
are gaining steam too, as counties, foundations, religious institutions
and other organizations join the movement to make their investments
fossil-fuel free.

By Ellen Brown/Web of DebtNov. 27, 2013“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. “Control food and you control the people.”

Global food control has nearly been
achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified)
seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But
this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our
food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in
the hands of transnational corporations.

Profits Before Populations

Genetic engineering has made proprietary control possible over the seeds on which the world’s food supply depends. “Terminator” genes enable the production of sterile seeds,
using a synthetic chemical catalyst appropriately called “Traitor” to
induce seed sterility. Farmers must therefore buy seeds from their
patent owners year after year. To cover these costs, food prices are
raised; but the harm is far greater than to our pocketbooks.

According to an Acres USA interview of
plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University,
two modified traits account for practically all of the genetically
modified crops grown in the world today. One involves insect resistance.
The other, more disturbing modification involves insensitivity to
glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals). Often known as
Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name, glyphosate
poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to
resist it.

Glyphosate-based herbicides are now the most commonly used herbicides
in the world. Glyphosate is an essential partner to the GMOs that are
the principal business of the burgeoning biotech industry. Glyphosate is
a “broad-spectrum” herbicide that destroys indiscriminately, not by
killing unwanted plants directly but by tying up access to critical
nutrients.

Because of the insidious way in which it works, it has been sold as a
relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier dioxin-based
herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown glyphosate
and the GMO foods incorporating it to pose serious dangers to health.
Compounding the risk is the toxicity of “inert” ingredients used to make
glyphosate more potent. Researchers have found, for example, that the surfactant POEA can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. But these risks have been conveniently ignored.

he Obama administration on Tuesday moved to
curb political activity by tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, with
potentially major ramifications for some of the biggest and most
secretive spenders in American politics.

Long demanded by government watchdogs and Democrats who say the flow of
money through tax-exempt groups is corrupting the political system, the
changes would be the first wholesale shift in a generation in the
regulations governing political activity by nonprofits.

The move follows years of legal and regulatory shifts, including the
Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, that have steadily
loosened the rules governing political spending, particularly by those
with the biggest bank accounts: corporations, unions and wealthy
individuals.

But the proposal also thrusts the I.R.S. into what is sure to be a
polarizing regulatory battle, with some Republicans immediately
criticizing the proposal on Tuesday as an attack on free speech and a
ploy to undermine congressional investigations into the agency’s
handling of applications from Tea Party groups.

“Before rushing forward with new rules, especially ones that appear to
make it harder to engage in public debate, I would hope Treasury would
let all the facts come out first,” said Representative David Camp of
Michigan, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Political spending by tax-exempt groups — from Crossroads Grassroots
Policy Strategies, co-founded by the Republican strategist Karl Rove, to
the League of Conservation Voters — skyrocketed to more than $300
million in 2012 from less than $5.2 million in 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Much of the money has been funneled through chains of interlinked
nonprofit groups, making it even harder to determine the original
source.

Heritage staffers for some reason don't like their organization being treated like a common school or corporation

Julia Ioffe has a piece in the New Republic
explaining the recent history of the Heritage Foundation, once the most
influential conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. — perhaps the
most influential think tank of any kind anywhere, for a few years — and
now essentially a very large email list and activist PAC/pressure group.

Many people noticed
how much the organization had changed during the recent government
shutdown/”defund Obamacare” fight, a giant waste of everyone’s time and
general self-inflicted disaster engineered and designed by Heritage
Action, the 501(c)(4) “pressure group” Heritage launched in 2010. On the
right, there was much consternation over the direction this
once-respected think tank had taken. Truth be told, Heritage was always mostly political hacks, they just used to be effective
political hacks with a realistic agenda. What was different now was the
cheerful absense of any coherent and/or achievable goal — beyond
fundraising and image-boosting for Heritage Action itself. Many blamed
this on new Heritage president Jim DeMint, a former congressman not
particularly known for his intellect, but Ioffe says the new tone at
Heritage, and the tactics of Heritage Action, were both largely directed
by Michael Needham, a 31-year-old former Giuliani staffer brought on to
be the CEO of Heritage Action when it launched.

Needham is a
child of privilege, the Manhattan-raised son of a banker and a Saks
executive. Basically the minute he was hired to run Heritage Action, he
began acting like any up-jumped MBA with an executive position. He and
his lieutenant, “a 31-year-old evangelical named Tim Chapman who had a
few years experience working on the Hill,” promptly took over the
organization, assisted by DeMint, who took over as president when his
kindly old predecessor retired.

“I was always struck
at how they felt absolutely no intellectual modesty,” says the former
veteran Heritage staffer. “They felt totally on par with people who had
spent thirty years in the field and had Ph.D.s.”

Hmm. Why shouldn’t they? What good is a Ph.D. compared to the education received by an MBA with a useful business degree?

How is it that our land, supposedly the beacon of freedom
and democracy for the rest of the world, puts so many of its own people
into prison?

We usually attribute the prisoner increase to a combination
of overt racism and Nixon's war on drugs, followed by Rockefeller's
"three strikes" legislation in New York, and then the 1984 Sentencing
Reform Act with its mandatory sentences. While racism and these laws
certainly provide ample opportunity to incarcerate millions for
violating senseless prohibition laws, they do not tell the whole story.

Racism was just as virulent, if not more so, long before
the dramatic rise in prisoners set in during the 1980s and 1990s. Just
because there are draconian laws on the books, it doesn't explain why
they are so dutifully enforced. It also doesn't explain why so many are
willing to risk prison, knowing the increasing odds of getting caught.

If we dig deeper, we'll see that the rise in incarceration
corresponds with the rise of financialization and the dramatic increase
in Wall Street incomes. Of course, just because trend lines on charts
rise and fall together doesn't mean one causes the other. But this
correspondence is much more than coincidence.

In fact, we could show you a
dozen other trends lines about financialization, wealth and the rising
incomes of America's elites that follow the same patterns over similar
years as the incarceration rate. What is the connection?

By the end of the 1970s, our
policy establishment embarked upon a new experiment to shock the nation
out of stagflation (the crushing combination of high unemployment and
high inflation). To do so, neo-liberal economists successfully argued
that Wall Street should be deregulated and that taxes on the wealthy
should be cut to spur new entrepreneurial activity that would enrich us
all.

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence
against Women -- a day which reminds us that violence against women
continues to be destructive and pervasive. Ranging from domestic
violence and child marriages to the use of rape as a tactic of war,
violence against women kills as many women between the ages of 15 and 44
as cancer, is a grave assault on many more women and girls and imposes
high economic and social costs on societies.

In responding to gender-based violence, the financial costs to health
systems, social services, the justice sector and indirect costs, such
as those of lost productivity, burden countries around the world. From
Chile, where intimate partner violence is estimated to drain as much as
two percent of the country's GDP, to the United States, where the cost
of domestic violence is estimated to exceed $12.6 billion per year,
violence against women imposes high costs on both its victims and
society.Yet, when women are able to live in a safe and secure environment,
they can participate effectively in the economy and society. This helps
overcome poverty, reduces inequalities and is beneficial for children's
nutrition, health and school attendance. Every woman and girl has the
right to live in safety in her home and community.

At UNDP, we address the problem of gender-based violence in
partnership with other organizations, including NGOs and civil society.
We aim to contribute to reducing violence and to promote women's
economic, legal, social and political empowerment. Through our programs,
we provide legal and psychological support to victims, and we target
the underlying causes of violence.

Improving women's access to the justice system and to legal aid is
vital. In conflict and post-conflict countries where justice systems,
security and the rule of law have broken down, women are particularly at
risk. To counter this, in countries such as the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, we are helping to strengthen the justice sector so that the
many cases of rape and violence committed by combatants can be
addressed. Impunity for perpetrators must end.

In addressing sexual and gender-based violence, it is important to
know more about the entrenched attitudes and values which perpetrate it.
A recent joint report
by UNDP, UN Women, UN Population Fund and UN Volunteers surveyed 10,000
men in Asia and the Pacific. It found that 80 percent of men who
admitted to committing rape in rural Bangladesh and China cited a sense
of sexual entitlement as their motivation. Of those who perpetrated the
violence in those countries, the vast majority never faced any legal
consequences.

Can religious exemptions still knock the wind out of ENDA's sails?

BY Ian ThompsonNovember 19 2013

As is now well known, history was recently made in the U.S. Senate
with the 64-32 vote to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. In
the hours leading up to this landmark moment for LGBT Americans,
senators by a vote of 55-43 rightly rejected an attempt to expand ENDA’s
religious exemption. The amendment, proposed by Republican Patrick
Toomey of Pennsylvania, would have created an entirely new rule that it
isn’t a part of any other federal or state law barring workplace
discrimination. It could have allowed even for-profit companies (your
friendly neighborhood Chick-fil-A, for example) to discriminate against
LGBT workers and applicants if the owners claimed the business was
“affiliated” with a particular religion.

The
bipartisan rejection of the Toomey Amendment was a critical victory
against efforts to misuse religious liberty as a license to discriminate
against LGBT people. However, before we engage in too much
self-congratulation, it is important to remember that ENDA’s existing
religious exemption remains cause for concern.

In an op-ed I wrote for The Advocate
in May, I explained that ENDA’s religious exemption could provide
religiously affiliated organizations — far beyond houses of worship —
with a blank check to engage in employment discrimination against LGBT
people. It would allow these organizations to discriminate on the basis
of sexual orientation and gender identity under ENDA — in any job and
for any reason. Right now these organizations are allowed to prefer
people of their own faith so that the organizations can require those
who carry out their work to share their faith. But the organizations are
not allowed to discriminate based on sex, race, or national origin
under existing law. So the ENDA exemption essentially says that
anti-LGBT discrimination is different — more legitimate — than
discrimination against individuals based on their race or sex.

Magnifying
these concerns is the reality that some courts have, for example, said
that religiously affiliated hospitals count as “religious organizations”
that would be eligible for the exemption. The implications for LGBT
workers at these hospitals are stark. A hospital often employs hundreds,
if not thousands, of workers, and may be one of the largest employers
in a particular city or town. Should ENDA exclude from its protections
LGBT doctors, nurses, clerical staff, janitors, and cafeteria employees
simply because they work at a hospital with a religious affiliation? Continue reading at: http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2013/11/19/op-ed-loophole-discrimination

Bernie Sanders is not burning with presidential ambition. He doubts
that he would consider bidding for the nation’s top job if another
prominent progressive was gearing up for a 2016 run that would provide a
seriously-focused and seriously competitive populist alternative to
politics as usual.

But if the fundamental issues that are of concern to the great mass
of Americans—“the collapse of the middle class, growing wealth and
income inequality, growth in poverty, global warming”—are not being discussed by the 2016 candidates, Sanders says, “Well, then maybe I have to do it.”

This calculation brings the independent senator from Vermont
a step closer to presidential politics than he has ever been before.
With a larger social-media following than most members of Congress, a
regular presence on left-leaning television and talk radio programs—syndicated radio host Bill Press greeted the Sanders speculation with a Tuesday morning “Go, Bernie, Go!” cheer—and a new “Progressive Voters of America” political action committee, Sanders has many of the elements of an insurgent candidacy in place.

But the senator is still a long way from running.

In interviews over the past several days, Sanders has argued with increasing force that the times demand that there be a progressive contender in 2016.

“Under normal times, it’s fine, if you have a moderate Democrat running, a moderate Republican running,” the senator told his hometown paper, the Burlington Free Press.
“These are not normal times. The United States right now is in the
middle of a severe crisis and you have to call it what it is.”

So, says Sanders, there must be a progressive alternative to the
conservative Republican politics of cruelty and cuts and the centrist
Democratic politics of compromise with the conservatives.

“[The] major issues of this country that impact millions of people cannot continue to be swept under the rug,” Sanders told Politico on Monday.
“And if nobody else is talking about it, well, then maybe I have to do
it. But I do not believe that I am the only person that is capable of
doing this.”

The independent senator has high praise
for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has recently been
talked up by some progressives as a prospective primary challenger to
the front-runner for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination, former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Unlike Clinton, Warren has a
reputation for taking on Wall Street, big banks and corporate CEOs, and
Sanders hails the Massachusetts senator as a “real progressive.” But Warren says she is not running.

Noam Chomsky is amongst the world’s most cited living
scholars. Voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in 2005, he is
perhaps best known as a critic of all forms of social control and a
relentless advocate for community-centered approaches to democracy and
freedom. Over the last several decades, Chomsky has championed a wide
range of dissident actions, organizations and social movements. In this
excerpt from the just-released expanded edition of the Zuccotti Park Press book, Occupy: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity, Chomsky speaks with Free Speech Radio News about media control, fear, indoctrination and the importance of solidarity.

Catherine Komp: It’s been twenty- five years since
the publication of your and Edward Herman’s acclaimed book Manufacturing
Consent. How much do you think has changed with the propaganda model,
and where do you see it playing out most prominently today?

Noam Chomsky: Well, ten years ago we had a
re-edition and we talked about some of the changes. One change is that
we were too narrow. There are a number of filters that determine the
framework of reporting, and one of the filters was too narrow. Instead
of “anti-communism,” which was too narrow, it should have been “fear of
the concocted enemy.” So yes, it could be anti-communism—most of that is
concocted. So take Cuba again. It’s hard to believe, but for the
Pentagon, Cuba was listed as one of the military threats to the United
States until a couple of years ago. This is so ludicrous; you don’t even
know whether to laugh or cry. It’s as if the Soviet Union had listed
Luxembourg as a threat to its security. But here it kind of passes.

The United States is a very frightened country. And there
are all kinds of things concocted for you to be frightened about. So
that should have been the filter, and [there were] a few other things,
but I think it’s basically the same.

There is change. Free Speech Radio didn’t exist when we
wrote the book, and there are somethings on the Internet which break the
bonds, as do independent work and things like the book I was just
talking about when we came in, Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, which is a
fantastic piece of investigative reporting on the ground of what
actually happens in the countries where we’re carrying out these terror
campaigns. And there’s a lot of talk about drones, but not much about
the fact that they are terror weapons.

Chattering classes are convinced Chris Christie will move GOP to the center. This totally misunderstands history

Chris Christie’s recent reelection victory has touched off a round of
predictable nonsense in the chattering classes. Just as surely as it
was obvious that groupthinking Democrats were foolishly giving Christie a
pass in advance of the election, groupthinking elites across the
spectrum are now touting variations on the idea that Christie — a
supposed “moderate” — is just what the GOP needs to steer it back to the
center, restoring its political relevance and winning the White House,
just like Clinton did with the Democrats in 1992. Of course, the notion
that Christie’s a moderate is absurd, as Elias Isquith quickly pointed
out here at Salon the day after the election.

The media may eventually fall back to a more plausible take: that Christie, like George W. Bush before him, is a governing
conservative, not a burn everything down conservative. It’s a
distinction that’s not always easy to make when you look too closely at
results (“Heckuva job, Brownie!”), and it’s definitely situational in
the long view, in light of Corey Robin’s devastating demolition of the
myth of “Burkean Conservatism” in “The Reactionary Mind,”
where he dwells and expands upon just how un-Burkean Burke himself
became in “Letters on a Regicide Peace.” But in the here-and-now, that
difference certainly may register in terms of ability to soothe
big business as a whole, and appeal beyond the base — especially when
the media helps out, as it did during 1999 and 2000, painting Bush as a
bipartisan Washington outsider (ignoring both President Pa, and Senator
Grandpa) while falsely smearing Al Gore as a liar.

But it’s a good deal harder to remake the other half of the narrative
into anything close to reality. Clinton definitely helped move the
Democratic Party right (passing NAFTA, diminishing labor’s influence in
favor of Wall Street, signing onto Gingrich’s version of “welfare
reform”), no question about that — although his populist campaign,
“putting people first,” sent a rather different message. But to the
center? That’s a mighty hard claim to square with the massive defeat the
Democrats suffered two years later — losing the House for the first
time since 1954, losing a majority of state governors for the first time since 1970 and losing control of a plurality of state legislatures for the first time since a 20-20 split in 1969 —
losses that took more than a decade to fully recover from. The
Democrat’s 1994 landslide losses ought to be enough to disrupt, if not
refute the “move to the center” narrative. But for various reasons it’s
like catnip to the chattering classes. They just can’t let go of it.
Considering its attractiveness as a mirror-image narrative for what the
GOP is facing now, a more critical look at what actually happened with
the Democrats in the ’80s and ’90s is something that’s long overdue.

To
begin with, the “move to the center” narrative is implicitly based on
the “median voter” school of political science analysis, which
paradoxically assumes that low-information median voters are the crucial
drivers in U.S. politics, while at the same time assuming they’re
sophisticated enough to move incrementally left or right, in careful
calibration to how parties and candidate present themselves. The most
potent, coherent counter theory comes from political scientist Thomas
Ferguson, laid out in his 1995 book, “Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems.” Ferguson builds on Mancur Olson’s insight in “The Logic of Collective Action”
that small groups with specific self-interested goals are more readily
organized for political action than large groups representing broader,
common interests.

A chunk of ice the size of the island nation of Singapore broke off
of the continent of Antarctica late last month and is currently adrift
at sea.

NASA satellite images taken on Oct. 28 and Nov. 13 show the before and after images of the break.A crack was first detected in the pine island glacier years ago.
Gradually it deepened into a rift and now, a full detachment from the
continental mass.

Scientists
say the city-sized iceberg measures roughly 35 by 20 km. (22 by 12 mi.)
and that it is anybody’s guess whether the iceberg will stay trapped in
Pine Island bay or get set adrift in the Southern Ocean.

That means methane may be a bigger global warming issue than thought,
scientists say. Methane is 21 times more potent at trapping heat than
carbon dioxide, the most abundant global warming gas, although it
doesn't stay in the air as long.

Much of that extra methane, also called natural gas, seems
to be coming from livestock, including manure, belches, and flatulence,
as well as leaks from refining and drilling for oil and gas, the study
says. It was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Science.

The study estimates that in 2008, the U.S. poured 49 million tons of
methane into the air. That means U.S. methane emissions trapped about as
much heat as all the carbon dioxide pollution coming from cars, trucks,
and planes in the country in six months.

That's more than the 32 million tons estimated by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Administration or the nearly 29 million tons
reckoned by the European Commission.

"Something is very much off in the inventories," said study co-author
Anna Michalak, an Earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for
Science in Stanford, Calif. "The total U.S. impact on the world's energy
budget is different than we thought, and it's worse."

EPA spokeswoman Alisha Johnson said her agency hasn't had time to go
through the study yet, but hopes it will help "refine our estimates
going forward."

While the world has a good handle on how much carbon dioxide is
pumped into the air, scientists have been more baffled by methane
emissions. They have had to use computer models to estimate how much
methane is going into that air.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson